This Page is a listing of current faculty projects. If these look interesting to you, go ahead and contact the faculty member!

Emmanuel Abbe

- The goal of this project is to use information-theoretic measures to quantify how much information can be learned on the community structure of a network by observing the connectivity graph.

- The goal of this project is to understand the 'chaotic' structure of polar codes, a recently developed class of codes which meets the Shannon bound with low-complexity.

Ravin Bhatt

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Mung Chiang

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Stephen Chou

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Paul Cuff

College Football Rankings: In college football, there are many teams and not enough games, making it hard to establish reliable rankings and comparisons. However, there are many attempts using polls and algorithms, and the national championship game is even determined from these rankings. I'd be happy to supervise a project that involves creating a ranking system and comparing the predictive performance of existing ranking systems. This project will involve coding. The first steps will involve gathering archived rankings and results (which may include some scraping of websites---something I will not be much help with). This project could easily incorporate more than one student.

Jason Fleischer

Big sound from small speakers.
We will use new methods of signal processing to improve the sound quality of small speakers, such as those in cell phones.

Claire Gmachl

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Andrew Houck

Building new circuit elements for quantum computers. We are interested in building the pieces for a quantum computer, and in particular need to build new and improved qubits to store quantum information, high quality directional couplers to route quantum information around a chip, and new types of isolators to protect fragile quantum information from environmental noise.

Optical quantum processors. We are beginning to look into optical properties of defects in SiC which could act as room temperature quantum sensors or quantum bits

I am always interested in exploring new directions and in engineering more broadly. If you have a crazy idea that you'd like to try, let me know and we might be able to put together a good and feasible project

2. Novel FinFET circuits and architectures: The semiconductor industry is moving from MOSFETs to FinFETs at the 14nm technology node in 2014. FinFETs come in many styles: shorted-gate, independent-gate, asymmetric, and thus offer a much richer design space than bulk CMOS. There are many projects that are likely to lead to novel FinFET circuits and architectures. These span various levels of the design hierarchy: device, standard cells, optimization under process variations, SRAMs, microarchitecture, cache, network-on-chip, chip multiprocessor.

3. Security of Internet of Things (IoT): By 2020, it is expected that 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet. That is very exciting. However, it also implies that billions of devices can be hacked remotely. Hacking of medical devices and automobiles has attracted recent attention. However, the problem is much larger. The question is how do we maintain privacy, confidentiality, integrity and availability in the IoT era.

4. Energy-efficient buildings: 40% of US energy is consumed in commercial and residential buildings. We have developed a simulator called retrofit-oriented building energy simulator (ROBESim) to analyze how retrofit solutions can significantly reduce the energy consumption of existing buildings (by up to 60%). This project involves extensive energy/cost/CO2 analysis of buildings under various climate conditions.

Antoine Kahn

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Sanjeev Kulkarni

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Sun-Yuan Kung

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Ruby Lee

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Bede Liu

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Steve Lyon

Much of the work in my lab is centered on figuring out how to build a quantum computer. We have a variety of projects, ranging from more EE-like to more physics-like. For example:

Designing and testing cryogenic silicon circuits. The quantum computers we are building will operate very close to absolute zero. We need regular silicon chips to work at these temperatures. We design specialized CMOS circuits, which we then need to measure, and we also test regular commercial CMOS chips to see which ones can be made to work at low temperature

Automating experiments and data acquisition. Lots of times we need to take a bunch of data or upload complicated instructions to instruments. Some of these projects are mostly software (we use Matlab to run some of the equipment), and some are a combination of software and hardware. Recently we used a Raspberry Pi (small single-board Linux computer) for automating a measurement, which worked well, and we plan to keep playing with the Pi's.

Simulating electron transport on superfluid helium. One of the approaches we are taking to building the quantum computer uses electrons "floating" on the surface of superfluid helium. As part of that we have been developing programs (combination of Python and C) to simulate their motion as we change the voltages on gate electrodes. Projects in this are would mostly be programming, though a longer project could involve both programming and experiments on electron motion.

Low-noise and precision circuits. We need to measure very small signals (for example, sensing the charge of individual electrons), and must control voltages with very high precision. We need to design and build circuits to do this, and then control them (probably with a Raspberry Pi).

Designing and building new resonators for Electron Spin Resonance experiments. Electron spin resonance is one of the ways we measure the "quantum bits" we might use in the quantum computer. These experiments use microwave resonators, and we want to develop new ones, both large "bulk" resonators(~ few inches) and superconducting micro-resonators. For example, we want to make resonators which allow us to excite our samples with circularly-polarized microwaves.

Sharad Malik

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Prateek Mittal

Internet security and privacy: The insecurity of Internet protocols and services threatens the safety of our critical network infrastructure and billions of end users. How can we defend end users as well as our critical network infrastructure from attacks?

Trustworthy social systems: Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have revolutionized the way our society communicates. How can we leverage social connections between users to design the next generation of communication systems?

Privacy Technologies: Privacy on the Internet is eroding rapidly, with businesses and governments mining sensitive user information. How can we protect the privacy of our online communications? The Tor project (https://www.torproject.org/) is a potential application of interest.

Vince Poor

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Paul Prucnal

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Peter Ramadge

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Barry Rand

Development of a scattering layer for thin film white LEDs to enable better outcoupling of light

Research on the synthesis and optical properties of metal nanocrystals to enable them to be used in LEDs

Improve buffer layers that act as charge injection and collection layers for organic solar cells. We would like to develop materials that allow for structural templating of organic semiconductors without any parasitic effects.

Study the purification and crystallization processes of organic semiconductors and their thin films - link these material properties to electronic and optical properties

If you have other ideas within thin film electronic and optoelectronic devices, please feel free to contact me.

I would be happy to work with students interested in robotic systems and/or aerial vehicles - one example: methods for compact, multispectral imaging systems and their applications

Alejandro Rodriguez

The Casimir effect on nanostructured fluid surfaces. We seek to theoretically study the influence of quantum and thermal fluctuations on thin fluid films sitting on nanostructured surfaces. We will exploit state of the art theoretical and optimization techniques from computational electromagnetism to explore wetting and dewetting phenomena at the nanoscale.

Repulsive Casimir forces on an integrated silicon chip. With the help of our recently developed theoretical and computational techniques, experimental colleagues recently demonstrated that the Casimir force between moving parts in an integrated Silicon chip could play a significant role in its operation. In upcoming work, we aim to show that lateral Casimir forces can be exploited to repel two micro-electronic devices on a Silicon chip. We will model these forces in a particular geometry, consisting of interleaved bodies, and investigate the shape and material dependence in order to guide and validate current experiments.

Kaushik Sengupta

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Mansour Shayegan

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Jim Sturm

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Hakan Türeci

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Sergio Verdú

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Naveen Verma

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Sigurd Wagner

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

David Wentzlaff

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.

Gerard Wysocki

Although I have not yet listed specific project ideas, please feel free to contact me if you are interested in exploring possibilities.